In Her Empire Era | Marketing & Business Podcast

Coffees and Content: ChatGPT Ads Are Here and Instagram Reach Is Dead

• Loren Tomlinson | Holistic Digital Marketing and Social Media Strategies • Season 5 • Episode 10

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0:00 | 19:35

Welcome back to another Coffees & Content Monday. This week I'm breaking down three things happening in the marketing world right now - including one we're already testing inside The Social Collective.

OpenAI has quietly opened the door for everyday businesses to advertise through ChatGPT and the early adopter window won't stay open forever. I share what I'm seeing, what the limitations are, and whether it's worth your time right now.

I'm also chatting through the Instagram reach drop that's affecting accounts across the board, why it's only going to get harder, and what that should mean for where you're putting your energy.

Plus, a teaser for what's coming next from In Her Empire Era. Sponsorship opportunities for the next Auckland event are open now.

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If this episode gave you a breakthrough moment, share your key takeaway on Instagram and tag @inhererampireerapod. Your insights might just shape a future episode.

SPEAKER_00

Hello, my lovely listeners. Welcome to another Monday morning episode of the In Her Empire Era Coffees and Content Special Edition episodes. I'm very excited to be back for the second week sharing with you our coffees and content updates segment. I think there's some very exciting updates that I have to share with you today that I have been playing around with a little bit myself and talking to a lot of people over the last few days. And I thought, why not report them to you in this segment? Because that is exactly what these episodes are here to do. And I feel like it's just really fun to be able to bring these episodes back. I think they've been very much missed. I have missed sharing some updates with you all. And I think that this is a really fun space to be able to share a little bit about what I have been doing in the marketing space and how we've been implementing these new updates and these new changes ourselves, but also be able to share with you why it's so valuable for you to be in the know. So I'm gonna dive straight in because for those of you who are tuning in in New Zealand, obviously today is King's birthday weekend, public holiday day. So for those of you who are tuning in, congratulations on joining me on a day off. I don't know if it's a congratulations or more of like a you should probably take some time off. But I know obviously as a founder in business, it is very, very hard to take time away. So I do hope that to all my founders that are listening, if you are tuning in today, I do hope that you have carved out some space for you today, not to just be working all the way through a public holiday. And to those of you who are employed or are listening and work in a different capacity, I hope that you are enjoying having a day off, making the most of it, really getting out there and doing something special for you. Or at least if you are working in any capacity, I really do hope that you have carved out some time today to do something that is filling up your cups so that we can start the week off on a really strong note and also go back into work tomorrow feeling refreshed because I know that that's what I am all about. So let's dive straight into these updates. I have two really big updates to share with you that have been very big topics of conversation in the marketing space, and then one really exciting update that I am itching to share with you all, but I'm gonna save that for later in this episode. So the first thing that I wanted to share is around ChatGPT ads. And I am fizzing to share this one with you. To catch you up to speed, basically OpenAI have finally launched their ads manager, meaning that you can now advertise through ChatGPT. This was something they rolled out in the States a wee while ago. You had to have $50,000 to be able to advertise and you had to be in the United States. However, it's now made its way to New Zealand and to Australia, which is so exciting. And the minimum spend is no longer $50,000. It is down to $25 a day. So it is actually incredibly reasonable. However, there is a few things that I will touch on around it. The first and foremost is that it is very much still in beta testing. So it has rolled out, it does have a low spend. However, because it is in such a beta state and they are just testing it to begin with, there really isn't a guaranteed return on investment in any specific capacity. It's really just for those who want to jump on, give it a go, test it out a wee bit, and see what the results are. So naturally, of course, I threw the social collective on there super quickly. I love being an early adopter of anything, especially when it comes to new technology and new advertising ways, because I think what we're gonna find is that this particular way of advertising is quite different to the rest that we have seen. Unlike something like a Google search where you are specifically targeting keywords or a platform like Meta or LinkedIn where you are targeting people by job or by location or by the pages that they like and the way that they consume. This is really starting to target people by behavior. So what we're looking at is kind of a different way of advertising and something that we haven't really seen before. So it's not just tapping into keywords, it's really starting to tap into consumers' thought processes. So it's looking at what people are asking in Chat GPT, what questions they're looking for, what guidance or what support they're looking for, and then really providing a way that they can serve up not only answers, but also solutions of saying, hey, I can see that you're looking for this particular thing. So in our case, it might be somebody that's looking for a bit of guidance or a bit of help with paid advertising. And one of our ad categories that we are running, one of the ad sets, is focusing on people that are looking for paid, paid performance and paid marketing support. And so therefore, they would start to be served our ads. The catch obviously at this stage is that there is no proper conversion tracking. So all I've been able to see so far is basically views, we can see some clicks, we can see the click-through rates, but what we can't see is any direct conversions. They are slowly starting to roll some stuff out, but at the moment they're not tracking direct conversions. You can embed code into your website, which I have done into the back end of ours, but it is not yet at a stage where it can confidently say, okay, well, like Google or like Meta or like LinkedIn or any other platform that you advertise on, we can confidently see the number of conversions that have come through these specific ads. This OpenAI ads manager is just not quite at that stage yet. However, I do think if you have some really good tracking measures on your site. So for example, with ours, with our inquiries form on our website, I've now embedded into that form a section that allows people, when they do fill out the form, to say how they heard about us. And I've included OpenAI as one of those options. So we've got, I've listed it as saying, how did you find out about us? One of the options being saying Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or something similar. So therefore, we can start to track if you have come through any kind of search engine that is AI driven. So I'll report back over the coming weeks around how this is going. But I think at this stage, my key takeaways are that the early adopter window is very much open. I think while this is a platform that is still quite the wild, wild west, and while it is something that is in development, I think given, I mean, if you just put your common sense together and think about the fact that not everyone is on it yet. And so therefore, there is a lot of opportunity for these new early adopter brands to jump on and to kind of check it out and get the exposure while it's early. I kind of liken it to, I guess, like when TikTok was very first starting, and a lot of uh, I guess the people that are now considered influencers and TikTokers, they jumped on, they created accounts, they just played around with it to see what the app was all about. And now they sit with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers. So I'm very much all about early adoption. However, I would only recommend this to you if you are in a space where $25 a day is a comfortable budget for your business. I wouldn't be relying on it as your only source of advertising. I would also really encourage you to make sure that you are still continuing to do all of the other parts of your marketing. So your socials, your emails, advertising on other channels. This is just a really great tool for those businesses who are in a position like TSC where we can just add this on as another, another tool in our toolbox. So it's definitely worth watching. It's definitely worth keeping an eye out for. And I'm really interested to see how this continues to change, I guess, all advertising platform behaviors. Because if people start to target based on thought processes and looking at what consumer behavior is outside of just the pages we engage with or the keywords that we type in, I think this will be a really interesting one to see how it can impact the rest of our marketing. So stay tuned. I'm gonna report back over the coming weeks around how this is performing. So far, we've only been running ads for a few days, so I don't have too much to report back on. But I will say it looks like we're getting clicks and it looks like more people are signing up to our email database through our pop-up form. So it's looking positive. Update number two that I have for you today is all around the purge of Instagram. Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about, maybe you haven't fully clicked onto what's been happening on Instagram. But if it feels like your follower count has started to go down, I want to reassure you you are not crazy. So if you noticed across the month of May, so last month, that your follower count started to drop, first and foremost, I want to give you confirmation that it's not your fault. What we saw was the biggest bot purge Instagram has ever rolled out. It was honestly quite crazy. People like, honestly, I think even the most famous of famous celebrities, I think about like Taylor Swift, Kylie Jenner, all of those kinds of people lost hundreds and thousands of followers instantly overnight. So what has happened is Instagram did their regular kind of purge of a lot of bot accounts. I think their softwares and behind the scenes, their platforms now getting a little bit smarter in terms of figuring out who is a bot account and who is not. Unfortunately, I do know a few people who've actually had their accounts taken down in this process. Sadly, when this happened a few years ago, I also know people back then whose accounts did go down. So this is a really great opportunity for you to look at how important is your account to your business. Reason I say this is because there are some people that I know that are content creators who lost their accounts during this process. And if you are thinking about, okay, I have a business that is currently on Instagram. Instagram is either a big portion of my revenue, whether it's through content creation or brand deals, if it is a big portion of your lead generation, that is also a separate conversation we should be having around maybe looking at turning on some ads or tapping into your email marketing. But if it is a big portion of your lead generation, or if it's just a really important component of your marketing, which for all of us, of course it is. But if your business is at that scale where if you did lose your account overnight and all of a sudden you could no longer communicate to your audience, would this have a really significant impact on your business? And if the answer is yes, at this stage, I would be highly, highly, highly recommending looking into Meta Verified. We have it, I recommend it to all of our clients because this is the easiest and quickest way to get your accounts back if anything happens. It is also a really great way to make sure that you are very clearly indicating to Meta, so Instagram and Facebook, depending on the platforms that you have it on. It is a really easy and clear way to indicate to them that your account is completely legit and you are not a bot because of the verification processes that you have to go through. Because unlike some of these people that I know, their accounts were not verified. And so what has happened is that as Instagram has gone and done this massive bot purge and cleared out a whole bunch of bot accounts, some human accounts have also been taken down in the process. And I would hate to see that happen to your business. On the other side of things, most accounts typically that we've kind of seen surveyed, I guess, have seen between about two to five percent of their followers drop. So if your drop was quite small, that's actually a really great thing. So I jumped on my Instagram after this had happened and I was really stoked to be able to see that yes, we did have a teeny tiny drop across my account, but honestly, it was very, very small. And that to me indicates that most of my audience are real humans. So yay, that's super exciting and that's exactly what we want to see. If your following dropped significantly overnight, or sort of towards the end of May, you noticed that there was quite a big drop in your followers. Rest assured, like I said, it's not your fault. It's nothing that you did and there's nothing that you posted that turned people away. It was just that those bots got cleared. But what it does indicate is that there was a significant portion of your following that were bots. So just something to keep in mind as you continue to grow your business and grow your accounts. But the bigger picture is, I guess, looking at Instagram as a whole, and the reason that I think it's such an important topic to bring up in today's episode is that across the platform, reach is down about 30%. Likes are down about 48%, which is wild. Like 48% from last year. And what everyone is referring to it as at this stage is a likes recession. They're saying that the algorithm is continuing to shift with no announcements. We're not getting as much engagement or reach or likes as we used to get. And it's true. And unfortunately, there really isn't much we can do. And this is why I preach so heavily at the social collective, but also through this podcast and this channel of In Her Empire Era, is really starting to take control of your marketing and really taking control of the ecosystem that you're building. Because no matter what happens with any platform, if you have things like an email database that you own, if you have ads that are increasing your reach and bringing in audience members that otherwise may not have necessarily found you, what you're doing is you're increasing your opportunity to connect with new people. And for those that are continuing to rely on a solely organic only strategy, what you're going to find is that the growth is going to become harder and harder and harder. Like I said, reach is down 30% and likes are down about 48%, which is crazy numbers. And I guess again, the reason that I bring this up is because we, I still see so many people spending like upwards of an hour on a singular post that realistically you might find that like 30 to 70 people out of a thousand see your posts. When I look at my content, I have just shy of 7,000 followers on my personal Instagram. And honestly, on a great day, I would be getting about 500 views. On a great day, I would be getting somewhere in the several thousands. But on an average day, it would sit between 300 to 500 views on a post. And out of that, obviously, there's even less likes and even less shares and less follows that come in through that. So unless you are actively chasing the virality and you are that is your goal, which for me personally, it's not. It's the awareness and it's to have that there as an extra platform to support the rest of my ecosystem. I want to be focusing on other platforms. And that brings me to my conversation of email marketing because across the social collective and our account included, on average, we see email open rates sitting between 40 to the largest client that we have at the moment has an email open rate of about 93%, which is absolutely phenomenal. I cannot even, I cannot overall understate how amazing that is. But your email database has so much more potential to grow your audience and to convert potential new business, especially if you're a service-based business owner, your email database is a gold mine. And if you haven't tapped into that, you absolutely should. Reason I say it is because email marketing converts at seven times the rate of social media on average. So you might post one. So what that means is that for every, say, seven posts on Instagram that you put up, one email can convert just as many people. I think that's such an important thing to understand. I'll continue to talk about it. These are the people that have put their hand up and actively given you their email addresses and said, hey, I love your business. I love your content, I love what you're about. I would like to hear more. It takes so much more effort to type in an email address than it does just to hit a follow button. So for me, I'm so much more invested in the brands that I have given my email address to and I get email marketing from. Yes, sometimes it can be a bit spammy and that's where you have to have a really good strategy. But I think there's so much more power and so much more that you can leverage off of an email database than just off your social media following. So keep that in mind because Instagram is going to continue to play these games. It's been doing it for years and it's going to continue. So what we want to do and what our responsibility is is to really make sure that for our businesses, we're showing up with that full holistic marketing ecosystem. And it means that it does not matter what tricks Adam Mosseri plays on us and what changes happen on this platform, we will always have a way of securing our future pipeline and securing those leads, those opportunities, those sales, you name it, doesn't matter what you're optimizing for. But by having a really diverse marketing ecosystem, that is ultimately what is going to really secure that pipeline for you in the future. This finally brings me to the third update, and I'm gonna keep this one nice and quick because these episodes are just meant to be a little sneak peek and I can dive into things a little bit more as the weeks go on. But the third update that I have is that I have finally started to get the wheels in motion for our next In Her Empire Era event. I am so incredibly excited to announce that it is still going to be in Auckland for this one. We have some more locations coming later, but for now, this one is going to be in Auckland. It's gonna take place in July. More details are coming very, very soon. It is, I think this is just gonna be epic. I personally am so, so excited for this, but I can't share too much because we are literally just getting the wheels in motion. I have so many more things that I need to secure before I can run my mouth all around town and tell you exactly what it is. But I wanted to use this as an opportunity to share an open invite for sponsors. So if you saw the first one that we ran, you want to get your brand in front of a room full of female founders, managers, leaders, amazing women in business, this is your opportunity to reach out. So I would love for you to either D us on DM us on Instagram, which you can head over to In Her Empire Era pod on Instagram, or you can head over to inherempire.com and register your interest. We are taking submissions at the moment. We are very, very selective in terms of who we do bring on for sponsors, but there are some amazing opportunities to get your brand in front of an incredible one, an incredible room of females in business. So I'm super, super excited. So if your audience aligns with our audience, let's have a chat. So head over to inherentempiera.com or hit us up on Instagram and let's have a chat. But for those of you who are wondering what it is going to be all about, stay tuned. I will have more to share in the coming weeks. But for now, know that it's happening in Auckland. It's happening in July. It is going to be one that you do not want to miss. And for those of you who aren't in Auckland, don't worry because there is actually going to be a way that you can get involved in this too. So I'm going to share more over the coming weeks. But that is everything that I am going to share for today. Make sure that you have subscribed to anywhere that you listen to in her empire era. Share this with any female founders, female leaders, managers, anyone that you think will find value in understanding what is going on with the digital marketing landscape. Like I said, these episodes now are really designed to take it beyond just sharing social media tips and tricks. This is the space where we can share so much more about what's happening in the full marketing world. It doesn't just have to be social media. We're talking about the full ecosystem. And of course, I've got my episodes every Wednesday where we are deep diving into so much more about how to grow and scale your business with some epic marketing because that is what we are all about. So share this episode if you know people that should be keeping up to date with what's happening with OpenAI or that are wondering why on earth they saw a bit of a dip in their Instagram followers. And of course, make sure that you get in touch if you want to be part of the next InHur Empire Era event. So reach out to us if you would like to sponsor. And if you would like to attend, make sure that you're following along. That's all for today. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your public holiday if you're still listening to this on Monday. And I will see you all on Wednesday. Bye.

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Loren Tomlinson

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